Jose Canseco Busted at the Boarder

Canseco just got caught trying to smuggle some illegal drugs across the Mexican boarder.

For many sports fans and players alike, this feels a little like justice, since he cashed in by snitching on his fellow players in his best-seller Juiced. In the book he said that more than 80% of pro-baseball players, including himself, used.

Many fans who read the book felt betrayed, because they wanted to believe he did it all without the drugs.

These days he's no longer playing pro, but was instead playing for an independent league.

The drug he got crossing the boarder with wasn't steroids. It was human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG). This is a protein that's produced by the placenta in pregnant women and can be gathered by collecting urine samples. So essentially, he was caught with a drug made from pregnant woman piddle.

But it is a banned drug and taking it is considered doping.

Why? Well, primarily it's used in fertility treatments for both men and women. In men who typically use steroids, it's often used to re-start natural testosterone production when they're cycling off the drugs.

But it's also used to serve the same function as steroids without actually taking steroids, because the injectable version of hCG increases testosterone production, which steroids does as well.

More often it's used as a kind of 1-2 combo, or regimen

It's possible that Canceso's heavy steroid use in the past has rendered him infertile and he's using the drug to get his boys back online.

It's a bit of a thin argument because he did not have a prescription. Instead he went to Mexico. And it's heavily linked with 'roid use.

Canseco was playing in the indie Golden Baseball League as of 2006. Strangely enough, it's the only independent league to have drug testing. I haven't been able to find any evidence that he's currently playing anywhere this year.

It is in the realm possibility that Canseco got caught on purpose. He just lost his house this year because of hefty divorce settlements and he came out with a second book, a sequel to Juiced, titled Vindicated. Before this story broke his book sales had been sliding. Because he got busted, he gets free advertisement and a boost to his book sales.

He's been known to be a publicity seeking loudmouth before.

Take July of this year, when he challenged Vai Sikahema, a former NFL player and pro-boxer to a match. According to Wikipedia: "Canseco claims to have earned black belts in Kung Fu, Taekwondo, and Muay Thai." What we do know for sure is that went down in the first round.

If he isn't playing there are only three reasons I can see for him using the drug: publicity, fertility or an attempt at a comeback.